More-than-human governance

There is a growing network of people and places exploring and practising how governance and policy design can draw on more-than-human and planetary intelligences. We are conducting an exploratory research project to learn who is conducting new governance experiments in Europe to map the field, learn from best practices, and share these findings. 

Questions we are exploring:

• Who is doing more-than-human governance practice in Europe? Or enquiring about it too?
• Where is the work being applied into policy and governance? 
• Who is doing what, where?
• What is emerging in this field in Europe?
• How can it be further supported?

We will be hosting a convening in June 2024 bringing together the cutting edge innovators in more-than-human governance and will share our research findings later this year. If you would like to find out more or share information about experiments you are involved in or know about, please contact Claudia Chwalisz at claudia@demnext.org.

This project is supported by Arising Quo.

Read more about More-than-human governance from Founder/CEO Claudia Chwalisz here.

Interesting Examples:

• River Roding Interspecies Council (Moral Imaginations, Policy Lab, DEFRA), more here
• River Don project, Dark Matter Labs 
• Les micro-parlements des espaces naturels, vraiment vraiment 
• Multi-species City, Helsinki, Finland 
• Multi-species constitution project, Berggruen Institute
• Assemblée populaire du Rhône
• Organisms Democracy
• Animals in the Room
• Embassy of the North Sea
• MOTH (More than human rights) initiative

Related Books:

• Spell of the Sensuous and Becoming Animal, David Abram
• The Sounds of Life, Karen Bakker
• Ways of Being, James Bridle
• Wild Mind, Wild Earth, David Hinton
• The Democracy of Species, Robin Wall Kimmerer
• Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer
• Eco-Emancipation, Sharon R. Krause
• Down to Earth, Bruno Latour
• Landmarks, Mountains of the Mind, Underland, and Is a River Alive?, Robert Macfarlane 
• The Moth Snowstorm, Michael McCarthy
• L’inexploré, Baptiste Morizot
• Justice for Animals, Martha Nussbaum
• Thin Places and Cacophony of Bone, Kerri ni Dochartaigh
• In a Flight of Starlings, Giorgio Parisi
• Blackfoot Physics, David Peat
• Entangled Life, Merlin Sheldrake
• Finding the Mother Tree, Suzanne Simard
• Le fleuve qui voulais écrire, Camille de Toledo
• The Mushroom at the End of the World, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing
• Landlines, Raynor Winn
• La propriété de la terre, Sarah Vanuxem

Related Articles:

• “Doing Politics with Animals”, Sue Donaldson , Will Kymlicka
• “Codesign with ​​more-than-humans: toward a meta co-design tool for human-non-human collaborations”, Alessia Romani, Francesca Casnati & Alessandro Ianniello 
• “More-than-human smart urban governance: A research agenda”, Hira Sheikh, Peta Mitchell, Marcus Foth
• “Towards decentralised civic infrastructure”, Dark Matter Labs x RadicalxChange
• “9 Dimensions for evaluating how art and creative practice stimulate societal transformations”, Vervoort et al.